The story of a PhD student weaving his way through a busy university corridor doesn’t usually make for breaking news. But then the average PhD student isn’t wheelchair-bound, visually impaired, and testing a new laser-based wheelchair navigation system. In front of a crowd of onlookers earlier this month, a student performed the first public demonstration of a wheelchair that lets blind people “see” and avoid obstacles, afterward remarking that it was just “like using a white cane” (presumably underselling the technology to blunt the jealousy blooming in the onlookers).

From the user’s perspective, the new high-tech wheelchair is quite simple: You hold a joystick in one hand to drive the motorized chair, while the other hand engages a “haptic interface” that gives tactile feedback warning you about objects in your path, be they walls, fire hydrants, or those mobile collision-makers called people.

Right now, the laser only detects objects at specific heights, meaning that a blind wheelchair driver could be on the verge of tumbling over a cliff or crashing into an extremely short fire hydrant without any warning from the device; the team is trying to remedy this flaw by creating a 3D camera.

Wheelchairs aren’t alone in the moving-vehicles-with-lasers category: Recently, BMW unveiled the Left Turn Assistant, which uses lasers to scan the road ahead and alert drivers as to whether they’re about to turn into oncoming traffic.